A Future for Africa

Emmanuel Katongole imagines “wild spaces” in which Christians may pursue God’s reconciliation

March 24, 2006

In his book, A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Christian Social Imagination, Emmanuel M. Katongole, associate research professor of theology and world Christianity, and co-director of the new Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity guides readers to “wild spaces” in which the church might offer a redeeming concept of how to live in a world marked by AIDS, civil war, genocide and other destructive conflicts.

Katongole is a Roman Catholic priest from Uganda. The middle of seven children, he was brought up in a Catholic household. His father converted to Catholicism to gain permission to marry Katongole's mother.

His book, a collection of essays, is directed at two audiences. One African and one American.

Katongole leading discussion at Center for Reconciliation visioning meeting in Oct. 2005.

There is an instructive impulse in all the essays for Americans. In one, he tells the story of his “discovery” that he was black when he first came to the U.S. to serve a small mid-western parish in 1991.

In his African context, black was a descriptive word used in much the same way Caucasians use ruddy or peaches-and-cream to describe subtle variations in complexion. He was surprised and somewhat upset to learn the socially and politically packed meaning of black in America.

He ends the essay with a story that we know too well in the United States. Toward the end of his stay in Indiana, he visits a woman from his parish at a retirement community. She turns to her friend and reassures her that, “Fr. Emmanuel isn't Negro, he's a priest.”

On the surface, this seems like one of those statements that make white Americans of a certain age cringe and rush to offer red-faced apologies for the naive insensitivity of our elderly. But Katongole offers a different interpretation for the anecdote. He sees in it the very core of what church should do. He is no longer the new black man in town. The church has invested him with a new identity.

Katongole with his brother, Fr. Joseph Kakooza, at the re-opening of a school building named in honor of their father, Antonio Burimanza, in Kismmula, Uganda, their home village.

That identity has begun to change the imagination of a woman who has been immersed in a certain predisposition imposed on her by a limited, peculiarly American concept of race. The color of this man's skin no longer defines him for this woman. The church creates a space, a wild space, which gives him a new place in her heart and allows for a new relationship.

His other audience is the circle of African theologians who are reshaping the world-wide Christian discourse. Katongole takes on the work of his African colleagues Kwame Bediako and J.N. Mugambi directly in a chapter titled, “A Different World Right Here: The Church within African Theological Imagination.”

He praises the depth and rigor of both theologians. His contention is that current African theologians use the structures of the modern nation-state to inform and construct their concept of church. The most extreme example of the church's sub-summation into the landscape of the nation-state is the cooperation of the church in the events of the Rwandan genocide.

Katongole with Father Nicholas, regional diocesan over Kismmula.

Katongole wants to imagine the church as both a space and practice. The church re-imagined in such a way is still located within a history shaped by modern nation-state politics. But it would offer concrete possibilities for shaping and living out alternative patterns of life from those constricting forces of political and economic discourses in contemporary society.

His Western audience gets to eavesdrop on these theological conversations in Africa. Since the explosion in numbers of African converts to Christianity makes that continent the new center of the world church, such listening is a valuable activity.

Katongole's current work as the co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School continues his interest in developing and supporting “wild spaces” for Christians to pursue God's reconciliation in a world of destructive conflicts. Along with Chris Rice (D ‘04), the other co-director of the Center, he is working on programs and designing initiatives that will help to form, nurture and support transformative leadership for reconciliation through teaching, research and partnerships with communities and ministries all over the world.

Order A Future for Africa

Also by Katongole:

Beyond Universal Reason
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2001)

African Theology Today
(University of Scranton Press, 2002)

Katongole's blog

To help support the Center for Reconciliation, please contact: reconciliation@div.duke.edu.